I have no experience with 3d printing at all and am looking for a good starting point. What I would like is a printer that requires the minimal amount of assembly or setup, and is very easy to use. I am happy to sacrifice some size or capabilities for ease of use.
From what I understand the Dremel Digilab 3D20 is simple and pretty much ready to go. It is also readily available and priced reasonable. I like that it is ul listed and fully enclosed.
any reason I should stay away? Anything that fits my needs better?
It would be good to know, what you are expecting to do with your printer, so it’s easier to recommend something. Do you want to use it commercially or as a hobby?
So there are completely different printing techniques out there. For example the one you posted is an FDM-machine (basically melts plastic and puts layers of it on top of each other), these are in general easier and cheaper to use. The Formlabs ones are called SLA-machines, they form models by solidifying liquid resin by hitting it with UV-light, these are great for precision and high detail parts but comes at the cost of higher prices, depending on your setup quite a messy workflow and more effort in post processing…
In general ease of use and build volumes come with higher pricing.
As a starting point from zero I’d recommend the Prusa Mini+ for FDM printing, if your budget is less of a concern you can look at the Ultimaker printers, they are really easy to use, are made very robust and have a helpful support but are more oriented on production environments (I’d say they are the FDM counterpart to Formlabs).
For resin machines the Formlabs ones (in whose forums you ended up here) are the benchmark level desktop-printers, I have one for about a week now, had nothing to do with resin printing before and it was very easy to set up and use, but you easily end up with $5000 for a complete setup including the wash and cure units (that I would totally recommend). There are also cheap chinese resin printers (anycubic, elegoo,…), they come with an LCD Screen and LEDs instead of a laser like the Formlabs ones but you have basically no support at all and have to rely on the community or figure things out by yourself, but you can get a complete setup for $600 depending on the size you need, somewhere in between are e.g. Epax’ resin printers.
For only hobbyist use, so not earning money with it, the Formlabs printers are really expensive and you also have to use the more expensive resins from their ecosystem, on the other hand the whole ecosystem is made to work very well together (that’s the main thing you pay for), it’s up to you if you want to pay that much.
But that’s more an overview than a real recommendation, because you didn’t mention what you are planning to do with the printer .
As glx mentioned, it would be good to know what you intend to use the printer for - engineering prototypes? Miniature statues? Cosplay? Something else?
If you are set on an FDM printer, consider the Prusa Mini or Mk3S+ - there is a wealth of online support for those, both from the company itself and the user community and it generally works well out of the box.
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